Free The Turquoise Lament by John D. MacDonald

just the same, back and front. One room.
    "Me, I'm a personal person," she said. She'd finished her drink. She leaned toward me and put her palms against the side of my face, cupping the sockets of the jaw. She slid forward off the stool, round knees bumping the rug; stood erect on her knees, and tugged at me until our noses were six inches apart, each of us well inside the other's living space, each breathing into the other's domain. "Look inside of me," she said.
    Well, so they were lady eyes, slightly inflamed, gray but so almost blue they would be blue at times, a tiny spangle of small pale tan dots in the left one, in the iris at seven and eight o'clock, close to the wet jet black of the pupil. They wobbled and then fixed full focus upon my eyes. They were lady eyes for ten heartbeats, and then something veered and dipped inside my head. There was a dizziness, then everything except her eyes seemed misted out of focus, and the eyes seemed larger. She became a special identity to me. Linda Lewellen Brindle? There had been a kid named Pidge who had a terrible crush. There had been a bride in white called Linda by the Man with the Book. She was an identity which had no name as yet, this new one. Pidge was a name suitable for the yacht-club porch at Bar Harbor, or doubles in Palm Springs.
    "Hey Lewellen," I said, changing the last-name tempo, turning it into a half-whispered name of a suthrun gal. Lou Ellen. Somehow right.
    It startled her. She sat back onto her heels and frowned up at me, shaking her hair back. "Who told you that? That was my grandpop's idea. They all said it was flaky. They all said you couldn't saddle a kid with such a weird name. Lou Ellen Lewellen. I didn't even know until I was maybe ten, and hated Pidge and hated Linda, and called myself Lou Ellen for… oh… a couple of years. I almost forgot until now."
    "It just seemed to fit."
    "Are you going to call me that?" The strangeness that had started working at six inches was now working just as well at a yard away.
    "Probably. Okay with you?"
    "Perfect with me. Travis. This eye thing. What I wanted to show you… well, you know. It works for us. For you and me. I'm a personal person. What I was trying to say about Howie, you could look into his eyes eight hours a day, eight days a week, and they're pretty brown glass. You bounce off. They look back at me the way my dollies used to."
    She was wiggling loose. Inquisition requires a kind of domination, a control of tempo and intensity. I pulled away from all the invisible strands she had looped around me so quickly.
    "And you know why the voices were laughing at you, right?"
    It jolted her back off balance. "I don't want to talk… "
    "Talk about anything that might be your fault, think about anything that might be your fault. You want to be perfect."
    "W-why do you get so-so damned mean? What made you say that about being no good in bed?"
    "Because it was a funny wedding, honey. No musk, no steam, no itch. A wedding of good buddies. A wedding of brother and sister. Remember the kiss after the pronouncement? The kind of quick peck the long-married get at airports."
    So she got down to the clinical details. She said at first it was all her fault, not being able to respond. And as she explained her incapacity to respond, the picture of the sensuality of Howie Brindle emerged. Beef and sweat, quickly stimulated, quickly satisfied. Some days early in the voyage, an almost insatiable gluttony, a dozen episodes a day, in a dozen places on the boat. Apparently very little tenderness, emotion, romance.
    "Like those damned chocolate bars," she said.
    "Like what?"
    "He keeps a locker practically full. He says he's a chocoholic. Right in the middle of plotting a course, or working out a position from the tables, or fixing the trolling lines, he'll pop up and go peel a chocolate bar and chonk, chonk, chonk, it's gone. Wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, lick his fingers, wipe his hand on his pants, smack his